Pakistan’s prime minister will on Monday warn the United States it will defend its air space if American forces mount another raid on terrorists suspected of hiding inside the country.
 
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani addressing the press conference in Paris Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES By Dean Nelson, Javed Siddiq and Rob Crilly in Islamabad 8:18PM BST 08 May 2011
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Yusuf Raza Gilani will seek to restore some dignity in an address to the nation after the humiliation caused when American forces killed Osama bin Laden at a compound close to Pakistan’s main military academy in Abbottabad last week without alerting Pakistan.

A senior government source close to the prime minister said while Mr Gilani will take an aggressive stand to shore up the government’s position.

The source said: “The Prime Minister will say that the United States should not have bypassed Pakistan. We have made a huge contribution in fighting terrorism. We’ve arrested close to 100 al-Qaeda people, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

“We’ll take appropriate action if any further violation takes place. We will defend our air space by any means we have.”

He will say that Washington’s decision to launch the raid without consulting Islamabad had plunged military and political relations between the frosty allies to a new low.

The country’s Air Chief will establish a committee of inquiry into the air warning failures which allowed American helicopters to fly undetected into the heart of the country’s military establishment in Abbottabad.

Mr Gilani is also expected to announce his own inquiry and to consult opposition leaders about the future of Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.

The prime minister is under intense pressure from opponents, including his own former foreign minister Shah Mahmoud Qureshi who has called on him and President Zardari to resign over the issue.

Mr Gilani’s warning will raise the threat of military confrontation between the two after new information discovered at bin Laden’s compound was said to disclose the whereabouts of bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri inside Pakistan, potentially leading to another raid.

President Obama’s spokesman last week said he continued to reserve America’s right to strike at terrorist targets in Pakistan.

The by US Navy Seals had taken place just weeks after Pakistan Army chief General Kiyani had met his US counterpart and agreed to increase military and intelligence co-operation, according to Pakistani government sources. The relationship had already deteriorated after CIA operative Raymond Davis shot dead two motorcycle gunmen in Lahore in January.

“The Army is very much hurt. There was an understanding to continue our co-operation in the war on terrorism and then in the following weeks they did this. It shows how much they trust us. The Americans think they can do whatever they want, but the Pakistan people are full of hate for them,” the government source said.

The CIA chief Leon Panetta last week said the US had decided not to inform Pakistan of the imminent raid because it feared its plans would be leaked and thwarted.

In a move that will heighten American anxiety over Pakistan’s reaction, local media named the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, raising suspicions that intelligence officers had leaked it in revenge for the bin Laden operation.

Sources in Pakistan said the name was incorrect, however.

WASHINGTON: Pakistan on Sunday said if it knew Osama bin Laden was hiding in the country, it would have acted against the al Qaeda leader, who was taken out by the US forces in an operation in Abbottabad.

“If any member of the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military or the Pakistani intelligence service knew where Osama bin Laden was, we would have taken action,” Islamabad’s Ambassador in Washington, Hussain Haqqani, told ABC This Week. “Osama bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan was not to Pakistan’s advantage,” he added.

Pakistan is pursuing an investigation to understand how the al Qaeda leader could have been hiding in a prominent town.

“It is premature to reveal details of the investigation,” said Haqqani, adding, “Punishment, if warranted, will be delivered,” he added. “Heads will roll once the investigation has been completed,” Haqqani said.

“Now if those heads are rolled on account of incompetence, we will share that information with you, and if somebody’s complicity is discovered, there will be zero tolerance for that as well.” The channel reported that Pakistani officials have interviewed at least one of Bin Laden’s wives. “We understand that one of the wives never left the same floor as Osama bin Laden because they were paranoid of physical movement, they didn’t go to windows, they didn’t have any fresh air,” the Pakistani ambassador revealed.

US National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, appearing in the same programme, said there was no indication that Pakistani political, military or intelligence leadership ever knew about Osama bin Laden’s presence in a compound in the hilly town of Abbottabad.

As to whether Pakistan will grant the United States access to the wives and the material in Pakistan’s possession, Haqqani stuck to a diplomatic script. “What we do, Mr (Tom) Donilon will know.” “Critics of the US-Pakistan alliance exist in both countries,” Haqqani said, adding, at the end of the day, it was a mutually beneficial relationship that will continue despite ‘complaining and carping.’

He also asked people in the United States to understand the Pakistani perspective and the ground realities. Islamabad, he said, has noted with satisfaction that bin Laden had been eliminated but it objected to any foreign intervention in its territory. app

Pakistani security officials reacted with scepticism on Sunday to a U.S. assertion that Osama bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network from his compound in Abbottabad where he was killed on May 2.

Washington said on Saturday that, based on a trove of documents and computer equipment seized in the raid, bin Laden’s hideout north of Islamabad was an “active command and control centre” for al Qaeda where he was involved in plotting future attacks on the United States.

“It sounds ridiculous,” said a senior intelligence official. “It doesn’t sound like he was running a terror network.”

Pakistan, heavily dependent on billions of dollars in U.S. aid, is under intense pressure to explain how the al Qaeda leader could have spent so many years undetected just a few hours’ drive from its intelligence headquarters in the capital.

Suspicion has deepened that Pakistan’s pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with bin Laden — or that at least some of its agents did. The agency has been described as a state within a state.

Pakistan has dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in human life and money supporting the U.S. war on militancy launched after bin Laden’s followers staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America.

The Obama administration has seen no evidence Pakistan’s government knew bin Laden was living in that country before his killing, the U.S. national security adviser said on Sunday.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is scheduled to “take the nation into confidence” in parliament on Monday, his first statement to the people more than a week after the incident embarrassed the country.

Pakistani officials said the fact that there was no internet connection or even phone line into the compound where the world’s most-wanted man was hiding raised doubts about his centrality to al Qaeda.

Analysts have long maintained that, years before bin Laden’s death, al Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralised group that operated tactically without him.

“It’s bullshit,” said a senior Pakistani security official, when quizzed on a U.S. intelligence official’s assertion that bin Laden had been “active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions” of the Islamist militant group from his secret home in the town of Abbottabad.

On Saturday, the White House released five video clips of bin Laden taken from the compound, most of them showing the al Qaeda leader, his beard dyed black, evidently rehearsing the videotaped speeches he sometimes distributed to his followers.

None of the videos was released with sound. A U.S. intelligence official said it had been removed because the United States did not want to transmit bin Laden’s propaganda. But he said they contained the usual criticism of the United States as well as capitalism.

While several video segments showed him rehearsing, one showed an ageing and grey-bearded bin Laden in a scruffy room, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a ski cap while watching videotapes of himself.

“This compound in Abbottabad was an active command and control centre for al Qaeda’s top leader and it’s clear … that he was not just a strategic thinker for the group,” the U.S. intelligence official said in Washington.

“He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions.”

DUELLING NARRATIVES

The duelling narratives of bin Laden reflect both Washington’s and Islamabad’s interests in peddling their own versions of bin Laden’s hidden life behind the walls of his compound.

Stressing bin Laden’s weakness makes his discovery in a garrison town just a few minutes’ walk from Pakistan’s military academy less embarrassing for Pakistan, but playing up his importance makes the U.S. operation all the more victorious.

The competing claims came as senior Pakistani officials said bin Laden may have lived in Pakistan for more than seven years before he was shot dead, a disclosure that could further strain relations between the two countries.

One of bin Laden’s widows, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, told investigators bin Laden and his family had spent five years in Abbottabad.

Abdulfattah, along with two other wives and several children, were among 15 or 16 people detained by Pakistani authorities at the compound after the raid.

She said that before Abbottabad, bin Laden had stayed in a nearby village for nearly two-and-a-half years.

Residents of the village of Chak Shah Mohammad, at the end of a bumpy road flanked by fields of wheat, were both puzzled and a little scared to find themselves at the focus of the investigation.

“Everyone in the village knows when a cow has a calf so how could bin Laden and his family hide here?” Mohammad Naseer, a 65-year-old retired soldier, said as he took a break from working his fields. “I can say for sure he wasn’t here.”

The village is made up of about 120 small, brick buildings, homes and sheds, and has a population of about 400 people, although many have left for work in cities.

Pakistani security agents have been going house to house, searching for clues.

“Police never used to come to our doors but now these guys are turning up all suspicious of us,” said school teacher Ahmed Sultan.

“My young kids are asking ‘Dad what happened, what did you do?’” he said. “We have nothing to do with bin Laden. We’re Pakistani … We don’t feel anything for him.”

The U.S. is looking into the matter. There are no plans at this time to withdraw the station chief. If the government had attempted to publicize the name, that would be the second such outing in the past six months, a sign of how deeply U.S.-Pakistan relations have soured.

The CIA declined to comment. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Tensions, which have been building between the two countries for months, exploded after the bin Laden strike, which sharply embarrassed the Pakistani government. In another source of strain, the U.S. is pressing the Pakistanis for access to bin Laden’s three wives, who are being held in Pakistani custody. The Pakistani government isn’t complying with the request, a U.S. official said.

The Islamabad station chief is one of the CIA’s most critical and sensitive assignments. The position oversees the agency’s covert programs, including the drone campaign that targets al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, as well as fighters who cross the border into Afghanistan.

The purported name of the CIA’s station chief was first reported Friday by ARY, a private Pakistani television channel. The station was reporting on a meeting between the director of Pakistan’s spy service—the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence—and the station chief.

“If we did not mention the man’s name, the credibility of the story would have been reduced,” said ARY’s Islamabad bureau chief, Sabir Shakir.
 
Supporters of a Pakistani religious party rally in Quetta Sunday to condemn Osama bin Laden’s killing, holding flags that read ‘Holy War.’
.Mr. Shakir wouldn’t discuss who had provided the name, but said he had “one-plus” sources.

The story was picked up by the Nation, a right-wing newspaper that has often accused American diplomats and private citizens in Pakistan of working for the CIA. The Nation’s editor, Salim Bokhari, said he didn’t know how the name became public.

“It has to have been released by some government agency,” said Mr. Bokhari. “Who else would know such information?”

While President Obama has decided not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden taken after the al Qaeda leader was shot to death Sunday by U.S. forces, other photos taken at the compound have been released by Reuters.

U.S. forces found Osama bin Laden at this compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, about 40 miles outside Islamabad.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said any outing of agents would be Pakistan’s “own little way of retaliating,” given how “very, very upset and embarrassed” the government remains over the raid and its aftermath.

The chief’s name printed Saturday in the Nation wasn’t accurate. Mr. Shakir, of the ARY television station said, “I believe we have the right name.”

The strain between the CIA and ISI first became public in December when a lawsuit filed in Pakistan blew the cover of the then-station chief and forced the CIA to pull him out of the country.

Some U.S. officials suspected the move was ISI retaliation for the naming of its chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, in a U.S. lawsuit relating to the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Since then, Pakistan and the CIA have tussled over a CIA contractor’s shooting of two armed Pakistanis under disputed circumstances.

The U.S. has given Pakistan billions of dollars in aid since 2001 and has repeatedly expressed frustration that Pakistanis are sometimes reluctant partners in counterterrorism—going after some militants and not others.

Speaking on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, President Barack Obama said, “We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan.… [T]hat’s something that we have to investigate and, more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

The Pakistanis, for their part, suggested the U.S. should ease up. “Could the pattern of bullying and then trying to give a lot of honey after having served a lot of vinegar, is that partly the reason why the patient is unwell?” said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., on a separate CNN show.

Speaking on ABC News, Mr. Haqqani sidestepped a question about U.S. access to the bin Laden wives. “This is a moment for me to be very diplomatic,” he said. “What we do, Mr. Donilon will know.”

On Saturday, the U.S. government released five never-before-seen video clips of bin Laden seized by Navy SEALs during the raid, providing the first visual evidence of what officials described as the al Qaeda leader’s “active command-and-control center” in Pakistan. The U.S. said the evidence so far shows bin Laden at the center of al Qaeda planning, not the peripheral figure some had assumed he had become.

The videos were part of what a senior U.S. intelligence official called “the single-largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever” obtained by the U.S.

Materials discovered so far by analysts include internal communications between al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan and its far-flung affiliates. Al Qaeda has branches in Yemen and North Africa.

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